Prudence--Let's find that virtue again!

Prudence

Well, we can’t (and shouldn’t) change the constitutional order anytime soon. That order produced a Donald Trump presidency, a moderately conservative Senate, and a liberal House of Representatives. None of them can or should act alone. Our only hope in the immediate future is to adjust our expectations along the lines once considered a virtue in politics, particularly conservative politics—prudence. 

Prudence means that we see the political order for what it is and what is actually possible. We look to the long-term health of the nation and the common good of our people, and seek to promote it within the actual possibilities of the moment within which we live and act. Our political leaders would benefit from a healthy dose of prudence that would allow them to work together, both sides willing to listen and compromise for the common good. 

Read my full article on government shutdowns, political divisions, deliberation, compromise, prudence here.

Yes Ideas DO Have Consequences--Read it!

Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences is a classic worth reading in the 21st century. Read my full essay on the book here, but below are some of his solutions--you know the problems!

 

Solutions

Weaver’s book is broken into two parts—the first tracing the history of the decline of the West due to the ideas spun off from the original attack on universal truths, and the second providing some idea of a means toward the restoration of order. 

How might we begin to undo the damage? First, by defending the individual’s right to private property, because in holding to his or her own property, a person may find some means of defending his or her privacy, fighting for truth, and may find some refuge from an encroaching state. In other words, property gives us a place from which we may take a stand.  

Second, he argues, we must reclaim language from those who have reduced it to sentiments, twisted it for political usage, and scrubbed it of common meaning with which we can seek truth and discuss our differences. 

Third, to counter the selfish egoism of modern man, we must return to a state of piety—piety toward nature, toward our neighbors, and toward the past. There is much wisdom for modern America to be found in Weaver’s diagnosis and in his prescriptions. 

Beyond the specifics of this important and challenging work, Weaver’s title reminds us that ideas can be powerful things to toy with—as likely to bring great damage as to serve progress. 

Whether or not we read Weaver’s great work again in the 21st century (and we would profit from it), we should at least use it to encourage us all to think—seriously think—about the potential consequences of new ideas, and to think about them, not only through the lens of temporary politics and our own emotions, but in terms of the long-term health of civilization itself. 

The events of the 20th century should ever remind us all of how close to the edge civilization resides and how consequential bad ideas can be.

Its time to revisit Russell Kirk!

At no time in American history have there been more voices overtly identifying as “conservative” in politics and the media. From newspapers and journals to websites, blogs, a cable news network, and talk radio, voices claiming the mantle of conservatism are everywhere.

Virtually no Republican politician would claim to be anything else, and right-leaning think tanks abound. We are, by almost all outward measures, at the high point of conservative political success.
And yet, what it means to be a “conservative” may be less clear than at any time since the Great Depression. Is it “conservative” to cut taxes, or is the “conservative” policy to reduce the debt we are saddling future generations with? Is the “conservative” policy to promote free and open trade, or is it to raise tariffs to protect domestic industries? Is it conservative to “conserve” the environment, or is it always “conservative” to limit the scope of government regulations? Is it the “conservative’s” primary responsibility to achieve policy victories through any means necessary, or to preserve the institutional arrangements of the constitutional order, even if it means losing some policy battles along the way?

Add to that the fact that despite having so many political outlets, most conservatives feel their country is pulling apart and their culture is disintegrating. How can all these facts be true—that conservatism is at its height, but there is less agreement on what conservatism is, and conservatives have the feeling they are losing the great battles for the future?

In this confusing time, conservatives would do well to revisit the foundations of their modern movement in the great intellectual battles of the mid-20th century. Long before Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh, and before Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater bestrode our politics, several great public thinkers were preparing the culture with the books and journals from which would spring a revolution.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important of those writers and offers a chance to consider his lessons for America today.

See my full column on why we need to read Russell Kirk today here.

Russell Kirk's Founders and the Unwritten Constitution

 RUSSELL KIRK'S FOUNDERS AND THE UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION

BY

GARY L. GREGG

2013 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of one of the most consequential books of the 20th century.  I am privileged to have been asked to contribute to a number of forums this year discussing Kirk and his work and am particularly thankful to Liberty Fund and Richard Reinsch for inviting me to contribute to this one.  As I considered what I would write and thumbed through The Conservative Mind, I hit upon some things I had never spent time thinking about and my essay represents one strand of that new thought on Kirk's ideas.

I hope you enjoy this section of my essay and will read the full version at the website listed at the bottom.


A consideration of Kirk’s founders, both missing and rediscovered, lead us to an understanding of Kirk’s conservatism that would surprise many who consider themselves contemporary heirs of the movement he helped found.  Kirk is concerned with institutions, including those of the U.S. Constitution, to the degree that they are aligned with two more critical under girding phenomena: human nature and political culture.

Throughout The Conservative Mind, authors and statesmen are upheld to the degree that their understanding of human nature is in accordance with the inherited vision of Judeo-Christian revelation and human experience.  Human beings are flawed, incapable of perfection, and suffer profoundly from original sin.  To the degree that political institutions are structured to account for this overriding fact and meliorate its most negative consequences, they are found to be worthy of praise.  Here the United States’ Constitution is good as it rests on just this basic understanding and accounts for the corruption of power by separated and checked institutions.

Though John Adams fought hard against the philosophes and their abstract accounts of human nature untethered to imperfectability, he admitted some degree of change possible within the human species.  Such change is manifest in the political culture.  As the virtues, values and ideas of a people change so will their political prospects, making any constitution only as useful or as pernicious as the culture that underpins it.  Of course, with Adams and all of Kirk’s conservative minds, any change is bounded by the fact that we are created somewhere between the beasts and the angels and are destined to always stay in that zone of humanity.

To understand and learn from Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, then, we must understand an overriding fact of human existence: sin and culture trump politics and planning. This is why Kirk, unlike so many contemporary conservatives, point us in the direction of the poets and not the politicians; the unwritten more than to the written constitution.  It is in this way that we might more properly consider our “founders,” not the framers of the Constitution in 1787 but those who shaped the minds and imaginations of the culture that produced it.  The Constitution of 1787 will survive as something more than parchment only to the degree that it is supported by the prevailing political culture of America.

FOR THE FULL ESSAY VISIT: http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/russell-kirks-founders-and-the-unwritten-constitution/

The Dalai, the Dinosaur, and the Tao

 The Dalai, The Dinosaur, and the Tao

Here are the last two paragraphs from a short essay I wrote after having the chance to listen to the Dalai Lama in Louisville, Kentucky on May 21, 2013. 

"At the root of the Dalai Lama’s understanding of the good life is a profoundly illiberal understanding of humanity. Where the modern liberal project is based on the Lockean and Hobbesian lie that everything rests on the autonomous individual, the Tibetan gave us a vision of humanity existing in families and in community with one another. He told the story of how his illiterate mother carried him on her back while she toiled in the fields and how he learned compassion through a deep and nearly constant communion with her.  A good life within the Tao sometimes requires us to carry others and sometimes to be carried as we attempt to make our way on this journey. We are never really autonomous and self-sustaining individuals. The very office of the Dalai Lama teaches just such an understanding as Buddhist believe he is the reincarnation of a soul who reached its journey but turned back to commune with those still suffering and striving.

"Perhaps we should not be surprised that the teachings of the Dalai Lama are so fully within “the way” that C. S. Lewis identified.  What is surprising is how much the undergirding vision of the man and his teachings are misunderstood by the post-moderns who admire him for lessons they don’t quite understand.  For the sake of the Tao itself, let us hope this 14^th incarnation of the Dalai Lama is not the last of his kind. For now, we Christians of the west should join in his teachings as we are all, despite our differences, either within the Tao or in the shadow lands beyond."

Thanks to the Drepung Gomang Institute and the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts for hosting the Dalai Lama and (Traci Simonsen) for inviting me to tag along.

The full essay can be found by going to:

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/the-dalai-the-tao-cs-lewis/#.UZ4WgIJ1Fyg